EDMONTON -- It's interesting to watch players watch each other when calamity occurs.
It's absolutely fascinating when something resembling cataclysm, catastrophe or collapse happens to the big off-season signing in his first game as a member of a new team in a new town.
"My teammates were very supportive," said Edmonton Oilers goaltender Nikolai Khabibulin on the morning after a nightmare that saw him make one of the great gaffes of all-time.
"It was great to hear," said the Russian, who wasn't exactly the 'First Tsar' of Saturday's 4-3 Oilers loss to the rival Calgary Flames.
Khabibulin gave up a goal on his first shot in his first game with the Oilers. Then, he went out to clear a puck with 49 seconds to play and essentially cleared it into his own net. It was the winning goal and starts the 36-year-old netminder with a four-year US$15-million contract with a .810 save percentage.
"Nobody wants to have anything like that happen in the last minute of your first game," Khabibulin said. "The way it happens is a not very nice way to begin with a new team. I think it is the sign of a good team the way they supported me after the game and again this morning."
Players look at how the new guy handles the adversity, especially if he's the goaltender, the last line of defence and the guy you want to be unflappable when everything is going wrong around him.
Especially this guy, who comes with assorted reputations from the many stops in his career. Reports are he's gone from an engaging guy when he broke into the league in Winnipeg to a much more moody man, at times an island to himself, in some of his subsequent stops.
For the media, at times talking to the Bulin Wall has been like talking to ... well ... a wall.
But his new teammates saw him step out of his equipment and face a media scrum after being singlehandedly responsible for turning a positive season-debut performance into a loss that lingers.
And yesterday, Khabibulin came out from the Oilers' dressing room for an interview.
Here was a guy who went home and found a replay of the ghastly goal repeated over and over and over on any number of TV channels and up already on YouTube while being the subject of conversation in every bar in town.
He could have been rethinking the idea of signing on with the Oilers to complete his career in Canada.
"It was on all those TV places because everybody cares about hockey here," he said. "In Canada, every good play becomes a great play. And every mistake is magnified.
"I wouldn't say it's any easier, but experience helps when something like this happens. Sometimes bad things happen. Experience teaches you that good things can follow."
TERRY.JONES@SUNMEDIA.CA
